Software applications and systems have become indispensable tools for helping consumers/users, i.e., users of the software applications, perform a wide variety of tasks in their daily professional and personal lives. Currently, numerous types of desktop, web-based, and cloud-based software systems are available to help users perform a plethora of tasks ranging from basic computing system operations and word processing, to financial management, small business management, tax preparation, health tracking and healthcare management, as well as other personal and business endeavors, operations, and functions far too numerous to individually delineate here.
More recently there has been an increasing interest in workflow applications as a way of supporting complex processes in modern business and mobile environments. Given the nature of the environment and the technology involved, workflow applications are inherently distributed and pose many challenges to system designers. In most cases, a client/server architecture is used in which knowledge about the processes being executed is centralized in one node to facilitate monitoring, auditing, and to simplify synchronization.
One complicated, unresolved, and long standing technical problem associated with the workflow application environment is that customers, i.e., software application users often find themselves stuck, i.e., blocked from making progress with their workflows, due to system, setup, and data synchronization issues, referred to herein as access and/or critical issues, such as billing, entitlements, permissions, synchronization failures, system bugs, etc. This inevitably results in negative user experiences, customer frustration, and time and productivity loss. This, in turn, leads to loss of business for the software application provider and loss of productivity for the user of the software application. Clearly this is not an ideal situation.
What is needed is a method and system for unblocking customers/users of a software application, in the interim, without the need for applying a data fix or releasing a patch or new application version, until a long-term solution can be formulated and implemented.